By 2012, GitHub had grown impressively. In many cases, GitHub had solved big, ambitious problems with programming itself. It’s important to note that although GitHub had been entirely bootstrapped prior to Andreessen Horowitz’s Series A round, this was not a matter of conflicting ideologies. Bitbucket and GitLab will inevitably gain some of the users fleeing Microsoft’s GitHub, but GitHub’s position in the industry and the functionality of GitHub as a product itself practically guarantees GitHub’s continued relevance, survival, and growth. In addition, the company had been growing revenue at 300% annually since 2008. If you could somehow add a brand-new feature or function to your existing product, what would that feature be, and what problem would it solve? In the 23-month period from September 2014 to August 2016, revenue from GitHub’s personal plans had stagnated — but revenue from its Organization plans had almost doubled. Preston-Werner first met Chris Wanstrath at Zeke’s, a sports bar in San Francisco, after a local meetup for programmers known as I Can Has Ruby. Net worth: $1.4 billion Age: 33 Country: USA Source of wealth: Collaborative software, self-made Position: Former co-founder and CEO, GitHub; technical fellow, “Specifically, there’s a strategy called ‘GitHub Everywhere.’ We want everyone in software to be using GitHub. By 2013, most of the Valley’s biggest tech companies were using GitHub, from tiny skunkworks projects to major proprietary systems. Today I decided to get rid of the topic. This represented an immense potential market for their future product. Not only had GitHub steadily attracted a strong user base with virtually no advertising, promotion, or venture capital funding, but it had also grown the number of corporate teams using GitHub to host private repositories of proprietary code. Although the two men hadn’t set out to create a business, the commercial potential of their idea gained traction early on. Many people pledged to leave GitHub in protest. On May 9, 2013, the White House drafted and released the official Open Data Policy of the United States on GitHub. By 2017, it was clear that GitHub’s future would be shaped by its applications in the enterprise. The tension between GitHub’s origins in open-source and its apparent future as an enterprise tool had long been a careful balancing act for the growing company. GitHub’s choice of Japan as its first overseas location was highly strategic. GitHub's CEO Chris Wanstrath would write on the company blog, "The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub's CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office." It was a programmer portfolio site, social network, and professional networking hub. It’s a destination for Microsoft, too. A small but vocal contingent of the open-source community felt GitHub’s acceptance of VC funding was a betrayal of the company’s bootstrapped ethos and jeopardized future open-source development. We use your LinkedIn profile and activity data to personalize ads and to show you more relevant ads. There was Subversion, an open-source version control system. One aspect of GitHub’s early years that many people overlook, however, is how solving the big, ambitious problems experienced by all software developers also drove development of GitHub as a product. Some users posted that they were already in the process of migrating their repositories from GitHub to competing services GitLab or Bitbucket. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing Git needed. What’s most remarkable about this period of GitHub’s growth is that the nascent company managed to attract its first 100,000 users in just over a year by word-of-mouth among the software development community. If you want to host your code publicly, GitHub is free to use, forever. On June 29, 2010, GitHub introduces its Organizations feature, a tool that allows corporate users to manage group-owned repositories from a single, centralized dashboard. Despite these shortcomings, Git’s potential gave Tom Preston-Werner, a Ruby programmer in the Bay Area, an idea. 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